katerina
I am already ashamed of myself when I see the way he looks at me. Like a sick person.
It is a look I get quite often, more and more so, recently—the concerned eyes, the strange tilt of the head, the soft, downturned lips in a facsimile of real worry, and I say facsimile because it is always strangers that do this, people who cannot possibly have any real care for me. I am shivering. It is only partially because of the cold.
His eyes are green, so green, hard like emeralds. When he blinks at me, I think, unbidden, of what it looks like to stare into the eyes of a god. (How could I possibly know this?)
I do not know what to think. I do not know what to feel. My stomach is starting to turn. I can feel it writhe like a snake, spit bile into the back of my throat, cold and acrid.
He is moving toward me, and I want to move back. Want-want-want. The feeling is so goddamned familiar. My muscles coil of their own accord; my heart beats hard against the underside of my tongue until I think I am tasting iron. I swallow, swallow, swallow. And it hurts.
I look at him. Really look, for the first time. He reminds me of—the best parts of the world. The Earth itself. The spiral of his horns like the branches of birch trees. The deep, rich brown of his skin, how it matches the color of perfect soil. White stripe like a bank of untouched snow. Eyes like grass. Like the wings of jewel beetles.
If he is looking at me in the same way I am looking at him—watching, scrutinizing, categorizing—I know he will see only blood.
Are you alright?
Something in me bristles. I should not be offended by the way he speaks to me, because I know he thinks he is being kind. I should not be offended, because his concern is, in some ways, warranted.
But I am not a child, I am not a child, I am not a child:
“Yes,” I respond, and manage to do so with some semblance of grace. If my body is tight, at least my voice does not betray it, light like butterfly wings, similarly sweet. (I have always been a good actress. I think. If I’m remembering right.) I nod at him slowly, and say: “I’m well. I only—am prone to—“
God, what word to use?
I smile. Warm, I think, and a little faint. “Spells.”
Spells of what, spells of what, spells of—
I am looking into the eyes of something with a pupil like a slit made in a piece of cloth, a slice of black in a pool of green iridescence, like this stranger’s, perhaps, if he were more fearsome.
“Katerina,” I offer. “Scholar, too.”
A petal or two goes drifting to the ground.
